dinCloud Announces Retail Cloud Services

(Gawkwire) – dinCloud, a cloud services provider that helps businesses rapidly migrate to the cloud through business provisioning, today announced customized cloud services for the retail industry including dinCloud’s award-winning hosted virtual desktops. Store owners and employees from traditional brick and mortar or online retailers can now manage store operations remotely from any device including a desktop, laptop, or tablet.

dinCloud’s retail cloud-based offerings include hosted virtual desktops (dinHVD and webHVD), hosted virtual servers (dinServer), and cloud storage solutions. The secure cloud offerings provide users with the flexibility and availability to run back office operations from anywhere, at any time. This includes accounting/bookkeeping, payroll, price analysis, access to customer information, and any other operation that is not dependent upon a physical location. dinCloud’s solutions are especially valuable to business owners with multiple stores since they allow all information to be centralized.

dinCloud presently partners with Valued Added Resellers (VARs) already established in the retail industry. Once such company, Avitar Solutions, Inc., says that dinCloud has allowed it to devise and integrate personalized solutions for their customers, helping them drive performance and optimize business operations.

“There’s no one size fits all when it comes to technology, but a lot of vendors give you a ‘box to fit in’ and nothing more. The customer suffers and a strain is put on the adoption of their cloud environment because now it’s restricted to what is in that box. Standardization is a good thing, but so is the ability to tailor a solution because what works for customer A won’t necessarily work for customer B,” said Andrew Walsh, director of operations, Avitar Solutions, Inc. “One of the reasons we like dinCloud so much is the flexibility to customize a solution that best fits our customer’s needs. They’re also more focused on their partners and customers than bigger companies like Amazon. We work closely with dinCloud’s engineers to build out our client’s infrastructures, which really sets them apart.”

Avitar currently white labels dinCloud’s hosted virtual desktops and servers, and has customers using both solutions (white labeled as “secure virtual desktops” and “secure virtual servers”). Avitar’s customers are able to handle all of their office and sales operations – from hosted email, file storage, marketing and sales data/materials, product lists, and more from anywhere. Because the infrastructure is centralized, employees can run an entire business from an operational standpoint whether they are in an office, at home, or on the road.

A grocery chain with eight locations in the tri-state area using Avitar’s white labeled solution is using hosted virtual servers to centralize its accounting department across all of its stores. Information is now scanned and paid out through its headquarters. Since its headquarters now handles most of the day-to-day back office operations, the grocery chain has cut down on costs significantly because it no longer needs an accountant or bookkeeper in each location. The retailer also saves on capital expenditure and ongoing maintenance costs since there is no longer a need for connected physical equipment at each location. They have plans to transition to hosted virtual desktops to handle currently de-centralized functions.

Scalability: Ease of provisioning (or deprovisioning) makes it easy to scale as needed. This is especially valuable during busy seasons when stores hire temporary staff to meet holiday demands. dinCloud can also regulate a firm’s off-site storage to accommodate increased processing demands.

Security: To help alleviate IT security concerns, dinCloud has extremely robust security practices and policies in place with multiple layers of security at the physical, network, and virtual layers.

Disaster Recovery: Using hosted virtual desktops means that a company’s data resides in the cloud – so if brick and mortar operations are halted due to a fire, flood, blackout, or other incident, the data can be accessed from anywhere, at any time, using any device. Additionally, to eliminate the stress and frustration of data loss, dinCloud makes use of back up procedures, saving important data in different geographic regions on a frequent basis, in a practice known as “geo-redundancy”.

Flexibility and Availability: Store employees can remotely andseamlessly access applications and files any time. dinCloud’s solutions offer users the ability to get their work done when and where they choose. Now, a store manager doesn’t have to go to each store to do a price analysis or payroll – one person can handle multiple stores remotely and centrally – whether that’s in the office, at home, or another store location.

“It’s important for retailers to find more efficient ways of doing business in a globally competitive environment. The cloud is a cost effective way to gain a cost advantage,” said Ali Din, chief marketing officer, dinCloud. “Utilizing hosted virtual desktops and servers can help brick-and-mortar and online retailers improve business efficiencies, allowing them to focus on customer service and merchandising.”